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GAZA, PALESTINIAN TERRITORIES—With a deadline hours away, Hamas on Thursday rejected Israeli demands it disarm and threatened to resume its rocket attacks if its demands for lifting a crippling blockade on Gaza were not met.

“Our fingers are on the trigger and our rockets are trained at Tel Aviv,” Mushir al-Masri, a senior Hamas official, told a rally in Gaza City as Egypt struggled to broker a lasting truce between Israel and Hamas, with an Egyptian official saying that Gaza-based militants were refusing to compromise.

The hard-line stance, voiced by al-Masri at the group’s first rally since a ceasefire in the Gaza war took effect on Tuesday, signalled that indirect negotiations in Cairo over a permanent truce in Gaza were not making headway. It was an ominous sign ahead of Friday’s expiration of a temporary three-day truce that ended a month of fighting.

A text message from Hamas’ military wing, the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades, warned there would be no extension of the ceasefire if there was no agreement to permanently lift the blockade enforced by Israel and Egypt since the militant group overran Gaza in 2007.

Abu Obeida, the al-Qassam spokesman, appeared on the group’s Al-Aqsa TV station and said Hamas was “ready to go to war again.” He threatened to launch a long-term war of attrition that would cripple life in Israel’s big cities and disrupt air traffic at Israel’s international airport in Tel Aviv.

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A Palestinian boy writes on a shrapnel-riddled backboard at a heavily damaged school in Gaza City. (MOHAMMED ABED / AFP/GETTY IMAGES)

“They might reject an extension. If they attack us, we’ll respond in kind, as any government would,” he told Germany’s ZDF television.

An Israeli defence official said Israel would respond “forcefully,” and that Netanyahu and his defence minister, Moshe Yaalon, had instructed the military “to be ready for anything.”

About 2,000 people showed up for Hamas’ rally in the heart of Gaza City on Thursday, well below the levels of similar gatherings on previous occasions.

In the fighting, nearly 1,900 Palestinians, three-quarters of them civilians, have been killed, more than 9,000 wounded and some 250,000 people made homeless, according to Palestinian medical officials and the United Nations. Israel lost 64 soldiers and three civilians.

Cairo has been mediating indirect talks between Israel and Hamas on extending the 72-hour ceasefire that expires Friday morning.

Hamas has demanded the lifting of an Israeli and Egyptian blockade imposed on the coastal territory. Israel has said the militants must disarm first, which al-Masri rejected.

The blockade, which Israel says is needed to prevent weapons from reaching Gaza, has led to widespread hardship in the Mediterranean seaside territory. Movement in and out of Gaza is limited, the economy has ground to a standstill and unemployment is more than 50 per cent. While Hamas is shunned by the West as a terrorist group, there is a widespread consensus in the international community that the blockade must be eased.

“Without the full lifting of the blockade of the Gaza Strip, Palestinians in Gaza will continue to be deprived of any sense of a normal life and the massive reconstruction effort now required will be impossible,” James W. Rawley, the UN Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator for the occupied Palestinian territory, said in a statement.

Late on Wednesday, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon weighed in again on the Hamas-Israel conflict, demanding an end to what he called the senseless cycle of suffering, telling the General Assembly that “the massive deaths and destruction in Gaza have shocked and shamed the world.”

An EU proposal to help end the Gaza conflict has, meanwhile, been gaining traction across Europe.

The proposal calls for reopening an EU monitoring mission along the Gaza-Egypt border.

In addition, the international community should help build a Gaza seaport for goods and passengers, with international inspection points both in Gaza and in a transit harbour in Larnaca, Cyprus, to make sure weapons do not get smuggled in, said an official with access to deliberations of European diplomats in the region.

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